COLTT Conference 2015

Guest post by:
Deb Bennett-Woods, Ed.D.
Professor, Health Services Education
Rueckert-Hartman College for Health Professions
Regis University

I attended the COLTT Conference last week with the specific intent to learn more about universal design.  If I understood the various presentations I attended, we have a fair challenge ahead of us, not to just  make courses accessible, but to make them both accessible AND remain engaging. 

In the many years since I have been teaching in the online and blended environment, I have worked hard to find ways to re-create some of the level of personal engagement and entertainment that is possible in the face-to-face environment.  Whether it is the addition of well-crafted audio slidecasts (with transcripts of course!) or the last minute link to a breaking news story or YouTube video that is just perfect for this moment in the course, I have looked for ways to diverge from fully text-based content.  Others have been far more creative than me in incorporating interesting technology apps into content delivery and student assignments. 

What struck me in the various presentations, which included a range from a general overview of accessibility tips to highly detailed workshops on making Word docs and PDFs accessible, was the sheer technical effort, awareness, and potential cost required to make every instructional element of a course fully accessible, especially prior to delivery.  Not only is there a steep learning curve for instructors like me whose technical skills rise just to the level to be dangerous, but the time and cost factors seem daunting.  I worry about having to adopt longer time frames for content development at the same time we are being pressed to move ever more quickly.  I worry about having to move more and more content back into a plain text format that students seem less and less inclined to read. I don’t want to lose the spontaneity of being able to post new content as soon as I find it.  I will worry that incorporating new and interesting applications into assignments and learning activities, such as the really cool polling software I saw in another session, will unwittingly create new barriers. 

I know there are ways around my concerns and I embrace the need to have courses be fully accessible to meet student needs.  Just as I made the transition from face-to-face to online, I will make this transition.  However, it will require a measure of support and the time to do it.  I’m interested to hear what strategies my own institution can bring to bear so faculty are using what time we have efficiently to meet necessary standards. 

The task could also benefit from some cooperative effort.  It makes little sense to have instructors all over the country closed-captioning the same video or creating audio files of the same texts and accessible pdfs of the same journal articles.  I hope that we quickly find a way to share accessible resources and application work-arounds so we can focus out time where it is best used – interacting with our students.